An archive of personal & political considerations

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I’ve taken a moment to look at this website. ?An archive of passed time, of used-tos and remember whens.

I’ve been reading my bad poetry! ?It’s so sincere. ?I can still see the places where I didn’t understand symbolism or metaphor quite clearly enough to make it work. ?But I wrote it nonetheless. ?I’m either impatient and careless or brave.

I have an “official” website now. ?A place where I think aloud solely about writings, a place to direct potential readers, editors, seekers to my work and contact information. ?But this – My Ecdysis – feels like home. ?It will always feel like home. ?It’s been over a decade that I’ve been online now. ?A decade.

I think it’s been at least five years since I changed the layout of this site.

Keeping these old posts – the humiliating evidence of a novice writer – and old creations called “new media” create a deep appreciation for the journey of the writer and artist. ?It is always humbling to see yourself a few months ago, a few years ago.

I considered printing off this blog and removing it from online eyes. Erasing the evidence! ?But I decided to keep it up for now. ?I think it may retire, somewhat permanently in 2016. ?Or some kind of radical change to signal a new era. ?2016 will be 10 years of My Ecdysis.

When I began, I was a restless 20 something feminist wondering how I would meet the world.

And now I write this with two sleeping kids nearby and a window peeking into the lights of New York. ?Times have changed, to put it mildly.

It isn’t really about the Charleston massacre, it’s about race.? It’s about racism.? It’s about White supremacy and knowing what it means for a White man to murder nine Black people inside a church known for Black resistance and liberation.? Knowing this, I wonder how to make others in my life understand that ignorance is not bliss.? Ignorance is the determinant and companion of racism and violence.? There may be many who think like Dylann Roof, but there are millions who don’t even give it a second thought.? That mass of folks is where I tend to focus.

The only way I know how to convince others to care is to love harder.? Activists often claim the fight for social justice means resisting and fighting against the “system.”? The system is clearly a part of it, but that’s not the fight.? The fight is against complacency, indifference.? It is against the docile citizens standing guard at the fence protecting their blissful ignorance.? To love harder means loving the suffering even more and [trying to] love the indifferent with bravery and speaking against their fastidious hold to passivity.

I have fallen in love so many more times than I can write.? The communities and homes I have built with other people have allowed me to fall even more deeply in love with others over the course of my life.? The deeper I declare this love of Other, the more distant I feel from complacency.? It is impossible to be complacent if you truly love another human being impacted by social inequality.? Love requires the danger of losing oneself.? It is not a romantic notion.? It is a fact of social justice.? Love is so much more dangerous than peace meetings.

I keep thinking of those church walls that held the last breaths of those nine lives murdered last night. I think about what may have been said in that last hour of bible study; in the exchange of faith, hope, and words of transformation, possibly liberation.? And in that space of studying, personal reflection, and likely rumination of one’s own life, the anti-Black sentiment showed it’s evil face.? What other than the word evil could explain the impermeable heart listening for an hour before slaying a spiritual community?? How could so much hate build in such a short span of 21 years of life?

When I worked as a minister, I tried to always end a presentation, session, program, or visit with a vision or word of hope so others could hold onto that afterward.? I pray to God that those murdered last night? were somehow held by a last thought or word that had been exchanged in love.? I know that it’s unlikely, but I pray that somehow they were able to hold onto that, and not the hate that killed them,? in their last moments.

Sunday mornings, before mass, I try to experience God where I can. ?The attempt to experience God before mass, I realize, helps when I fail to have a spiritual experience at church, which is often. ?Should the music dry my already thirsty soul, should the homily fall in my expectations to be inspired to run out the church doors and give myself to the poor, should the cold handshake I receive from the person sitting in front of me bother me too much — I will have the morning as solace for church.

This morning I woke at 5am to a grunting baby. ?Rosario, greeting the world with small utterances from deep in her little body, drank and drank from my left breast. ?She quickly quieted herself, seemingly content that I anticipated her needs before her grunts grew into a full city-heard cry. ?My breakfast, egg whites and oatmeal, vanished without delay. ?My hunger after nursing Rosario demands fast preparation hands. ?Afterward, the stillness of the apartment and borrowed silence in the Bronx led me to the couch. ?Alone with nothing but a cup of coffee and a book. ?I knew it wouldn’t last so I dove into Dorothy Day’s, “The Long Loneliness,” her autobiography. ?Within the first pages, I became lost in her early explanations of how she was haunted by God, plagued by early realizations of good and evil, knowing good from bad. ?I resonated with her.

It brought early memories of my own family, especially my mother who, in raising four children, grew to depend on prayer and faith the way modern American housewives now depend on evening glasses of red wine. ?What struck me as especially inspiring is reading about (arguably) a modern day saint worker who confesses to the ordinary sins of life and Day’s ability to describe that mundane nature as inherent and natural as our right to breathe.

— Interruption: When I checked Facebook earlier, another writer asks how to write as a mother. ?And I write a few lines of encouragement, trying to bid her to the side of optimism. ?Remembering that life – writing, parenting, work – are all life practices that we hope to master but never truly succeed. ?As I write those lines and these, my son asks for help in stripping a tag off a new shirt, removing a plastic binding from a stamp he received as a gift, and Nick exits the shower with steam and carrying his iPhone, playing old rock songs. ?Each one perforates my silence, the caffeinated inspiration that has descended, temporarily, on me. ?And I try to write quickly, incisively, and with depth knowing, hating that the inspiration, like my morning breakfast will quickly evaporate into nothingness. ?This last line was interrupted once again by my son, asking for me to look at birthday card he made for his cousin. ?The clippings of conversation from the kitchen slide through from under the door. ?My breasts tingle, asking for either a baby’s latch or a pump. ?Interruptions, interruptions. —

Dorothy Day shares her earliest memories and the tone reminds me of an investigational hunt; the scouring for evidence, the search for bread crumbs that led her to the place where she writes the paragraphs about what made her Catholic. ?It moves me into deeper consciousness – my preferred place of existence – and a flood of memories surface. ?Irrelevant shards of childhood, splintered afternoons that I can only recall in patchy images – like my siblings and I trying to cook my parents dinner to celebrate their 20th anniversary, and my serving them plates of food on roller-skates – and with difficulty in understanding why my brain preserved that particular moment.

I remember afternoons staring into the blue sky, wondering about God, or what I thought God to be. ?New Jersey summer nights and the smell of the community pool, tv dinners, and 10 o’clock chides from my mother to the rest of the family to gather in the living room to pray the rosary. ?It occurs to me, in the stillness, when Rosario, Isaiah, and Nick are soothed by their dreams, that I can remember nearly everything important if I concentrate long enough and have enough stillness for my mind to recall what was long forgotten. ?If it had to do with God, I will remember it with enough coaxing.

The project I am about to endure is daunting. ?I don’t know where to begin a memoir about my faith, but what I do know is that I am no longer afraid to begin writing it. ?I am, however, still steeped in the fear of what I will unearth, but I have come to the conclusion that that fear is healthy, perhaps even necessary in my telling such a story. ?A story, I believe will probably be, the story of my life. ?(Double entendre: story of my life literally, story of my life referring to importance and ambition). ?Or maybe it just feels that way at the young age of 36 which IS young in the memoirist world. ?I remember when 30 was old. ?Such paradox, the writing age vs gestational age.

I keep thinking that this summer will deliver me from myself; like I will awaken as the person and writer I long to call myself, my skin clear of the self-inflicted bruises of perceived inferiority and doubt. ?Someone without a shadow following me. ?I continue doubting my ability to write despite a growing list of publications, even after a year of studying in a writing program. ?The irony catches me, confounds me. ?This explains whey I find such comfort in Day’s writings. ?She began as a savvy journalist with an array of glittered literary friends in New York. ?But then a shift happens. ?She leaves the world of literature, art, and journalism and she writes of the decisions that eventually led her to pursue justice and a life of faith. What I read is the ultimate surrender to the haunting of what she described as a child. ?Perhaps it is the haunting that most comforts me, the knowing that if others are haunted, it is not my imagination that a Ghost indeed exists, and that same Ghost, the one that accompanies me from birth to my unknown death, has cloaked the shoulders of others, asking for their life. ?Her work gestures skyward as if to say, “There would be no shadow following you were the sun not shining over your shoulder.”

Writing about my faith is like asking me to fight in a war where I am both sides. ?The battle field’s territory is my interiority. ?There will only be one victor and one casualty, and they will be one in the same. ?But if I am truthful, the war has been waging for years. ?36 years to be exact. ?Writing about it is just a formal sharing.

Sometimes the road feels like home. ?The shoulders of highway feel like walls and the yellow dash line feels as familiar as the handrail going up the steps to the bedrooms. ?Sometimes the car is my couch. ?That’s how 2014 has been spent. Traveling. ?Being uprooted, splintered weeks where a Wednesday feels as uneventful as Sunday. ?When the days run together and all I’m checking in on is the weather: bliss.

In the midst of Nick’s ever traveling job, he meets up with us wherever we are in the country. ?The past few weeks it’s been Norfolk International Airport. ?Visiting my folks and then family vacation in the Outerbanks, Isaiah and I have been little beach bums, kicking sand off our sandals in our drive from the south all the way to Philadelphia for a wedding, and finally headed home last night.

I’m home, but the house is emptying as we ready for the New York move. ?It’s home, but not. ?It’s too clean to be called home. ?The walls too bare, the floors too shiny, the simple decor too obviously minimized for strangers to be home. ?Yet we’ve never been happier, healthier, or pleased. ?We have so many tomorrows unfolding and life is too short to be spent in anything but gratitude. ?Right now, I’m just enjoying that I have two homes: the road and this house with a small echo.

Today we’re off to Russia. It’s a surprise. ?Ron, my father in law, is retiring from the job he has had for 40 years. 40 years! ?We’re sneaking in to surprise him on his last day of work after four decades of service.

What a privilege to have that kind of security, to move into your late years with security, pension, and pride of accomplishment. ?I remember as a young adult thinking that the word “retirement” was one of the most depressing words in the English language. Now? I think it’s a word that drives me into a state of wonder. Celebrating not only retirement but the man who sacrificed many things to stay in that one place in his whole life; for family, roots, and belonging. ?I am so proud of him.

I’ve been reading and writing more lately. Trying to establish the habits that I will surely need in my MFA program. I’ve found that I need to do something else to balance my literary heavy life. Photography came back into focus. I haven’t picked up the camera in a long time but I was reminded why I love it so much, how I feel the artistry of everyday came alive in small snapshots of the environment around me.

Although flowers are cliche, I am constantly reminded of how beautifully detailed they are, and how often they are ignored in the busy rush of the day. ?Part of spirituality is to notice things, not for the sake of beauty, but for the sake of wonder. Wonder is the output of a spiritual awakening.